Greenville, Jersey City

Greenville is a neighborhood of Jersey City in Hudson County, New Jersey, making up the southernmost section of the city. The area was known as Minkakwa by the Lenape Native Americans, and it was first settled by the Dutch in 1647. In 1840, Greenville became a part of the newly formed Hudson County, and it grew as a fashionable suburb of New York City. In 1863, Greenville was incorporated as a township, but it was absorbed into Jersey City in 1873. Greenville was settled by mainly working-class Irish families, as well as other ethnic groups, but the 1950s saw the decline of factories and the collapse of independent railroad lines. The area east of Kennedy Boulevard came to be mostly African-American, while the area west of Kennedy grew to have a large Filipino population. Greenville also came to have a sizeable Hispanic and Egyptian population, as well as having older Irish residents. The neighborhood had a reputation for urban decay, and numerous drug- and gang-related murders and shootings took place in Greenville between 1993 and 2002. Most of Jersey City's 39 murders in 2005 took place in Greenville, and the crime spike led to authorities imposing a curfew on business owners along the crime-ridden Martin Luther King Drive and Ocean Avenue.